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One of the protocols I perform when I have a new patient is I look at the labels of the multiple vitamin and calcium supplements they are taking as their daily routine.

In this blog, I’ll be talking about two minerals that may be critical to your health.

One of the most common problems is the use of Calcium Carbonate in the supplement they are taking. Calcium Carbonate is an antacid which a lot of vitamin companies use because it is cheap.

The problem is that you need acid in your stomach in order to digest your food and absorb vitamins and mineral from both your diet and your supplements. Taking Calcium Carbonate stops that digestive process.

Decreasing (or completely getting rid of) the acid in your stomach means that you can’t digest and absorb not only Calcium but protein, iron, Vitamin B12 and zinc.

So basically you are setting yourself up for osteoporosis, fatigue, muscle wasting, iron anemia, memory problems and poor wound healing to mention a few.

And because of the lack of acid, you may feel like you have heartburn and think that you have too acid and take more antacids; further compounding the problem.

The other major mineral in patient’s supplements that I’ll be talking about is iron.

Unless you are a menstruating women w a heavy flow or an extreme athlete or on an extreme starvation diet, iron supplementation may not be necessary.

Iron is present in animal protein and beans, legumes and some leafy green vegetables. And a lot of packaged foods like cereal and dairy and nut milk products have added iron.

Too much iron can accumulate in organs like the brain, the pancreas, gonads, pituitary, liver, the joints and heart and cause problems like toxic liver, arthritis, dementia, etc

Lab tests for excess iron include serum ferritin level and transferrin saturation; regular anemia testing will not show the problem.

A great way to keep your iron levels from getting too high from added iron in your food is to donate blood (and great karma).

There are vitamin companies that make multi-vitamin minerals that do not have added iron; one company that I recommend and use is Metagenics. (http://www.metagenics.com )

Yes I know you are scratching your head over that title, wondering what the heck am I talking about.

A case in point happened this weekend and the following days in my office.

Last Saturday afternoon, I noted that I had a sensation of nausea and by the time I got home, I had the “runs.” When I took my temperature, I was 100F –another sign that my body was fighting some sort of infection but not “medically significant” or dangerous. http://www.medicinenet.com/aches_pain_fever/article.htm

So I heated up some chicken broth, added some extra sea salt to it and drank a lot of water in order to help aid whatever my body was trying to get rid of and prevent any dehydration that would have made me sicker. The rest of Saturday as well as Sunday was a cycle of sleep (the body’s best anti-oxidant), waking up to go to the bathroom, liquid intake, work on my neuro-lymphatic pts and acu-points for my intestines, television, bathroom, lymphatic/acu-points, sleep, liquid, sleep, etc.

But by Sunday night, my temperature was back to normal and the trips to the bathroom were getting more spaced apart. On Monday, I got a friend to stop by and pick up some “sticky rice” at a local Chinese restaurant to help to start to slow up the runs. Tuesday, I was able to go out to a food store for some chicken & noodle soup, some yogurt and a bottle of Pepto-Bismol. By the time evening arrived and only one bowel movement in the mid afternoon & normal temperature I knew that I could go into work the next day.

At work on Weds, one of my newer patients came in complaining of a lung & bronchial infection for which he was taking antibiotics which started after he was treated for diarrhea while on a trip with corticosteroids. In other words, immune suppression of his natural intestinal response led to a lung infection.

As an Applied Kinesiologist I know that the Lung and the Large intestine are Yin /Yang partners in the body’s health.

For people like myself in non-allopathic medicine (chiropractic, acupuncturist, naturopaths, etc) symptoms are not only clues to what disease or problem is affecting the patient but also symptoms can express the body’s attempt to heal itself. Therefore symptoms should not be covered up by treatment. Suppression of symptoms did not heal the body or cure the disease, the illness just moved to another area

In our modern society, we have been trained (mostly) by the pharmaceutical companies to equate symptoms of illness w/ an illness or a disease that needs to be suppressed.

Have heartburn; take an antacid or proton inhibitor..effective in the short term but can cause if used long term diseases like osteoporosis and dementia due to nutrition deficiencies caused by the heartburn drugs.

Instead how about changing your diet or seeing if the body needs a hiatal hernia fixed or some digestive enzymes.

So the next time, you have vague symptoms like coughing, slight fever, diarrhea, tiredness, etc, please instead of masking these symptoms with drugs, think about what may be causing the symptoms and consult a non-allopathic healer to help your body fight what is causing the symptoms.

There are studies going on that suggest that different foods, certain nutrients and exercise may have an effect on not only preventing amyloid deposits but may have an effect in clearing them. Some of the studies that are going on are based on observation of lower rates of Alzheimer’s in populations that use certain foods.

Rosemary has a very old reputation for improving memory, and has been used as a symbol for remembrance (during weddings, war commemorations and funerals) in Europe and Australia In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Ophelia says, “There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance.”

At the 240th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society on August 23, 2010, research on cultured mouse hippocampal cells, found that extracts of blueberries, strawberries, and acai berries help autophagy, a method by which toxic debris are sequestered in the brain. Studies have shown that this “housekeeping” function in the brain declines considerably as we age, which can lead to the buildup of proteins linked to age-related mental decline and memory loss. http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/727764?src=mpnews